Sorry Google; These Marketers Actually Enjoy Being Evil

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When Google went public in 2004, founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin defined their company's culture with the phrase: "Don't be evil." That advice has become a touchstone in Silicon Valley, invoked both earnestly and ironically. Now two Internet marketers have turned the phrase inside-out: running a brainstorming session aimed at finding new ways of doing the devil's work.

At the South by Southwest conference in Austin, Texas, at least 200 online-ad specialists packed a hotel ballroom to learn about Malevolent Marketing 101. The session was jointly led by Robbie Whiting (founder of the San Francisco ad agency Argonaut), and Garrick Schmitt, a longtime ad executive at Razorfish who is now setting up his own advertising start-up.

Taking their cue from Google's core business of online advertising, Whiting and Schmitt began their SXSW session by filling a 30-foot wall with butcher-paper lists of all the ways that digital marketers could misuse customers' data, manipulate the public's mind, and engage in what were euphemistically called "dark practices." Reinforcing the message that this would be an excursion into the sinister, both men showed up dressed entirely in black.

(Credit: Alex Gorzen via Flickr/Creative Commons)

Audience members were asked to identify the areas that horrified -- or thrilled -- them the most. "There's a lot of experience in this room, a lot of evil people; I can sense it," Whiting declared at the outset.

Surprisingly, audience members expressed hardly any concern about government misuse of data, even though some controversial practices by the U.S. National Security Administration have been in the headlines for the past year. Instead, the audience was most stirred up by the risks of content manipulation and by ethically dubious ways of gathering and using data from wearable devices and the profusion of digitally connected devices known as the Internet of Things.

Undeterred by such grumbles, Whiting and Schmitt challenged the audience to come up with a product that would combine everyone's worst fears. A frenzy of brainstorming led to a concept dubbed "Perfect You ," or "You Look Marvelous." It would consist of a three-dimensional body scanner at the entrance to clothing stores, which would spew its results into a series of photo-rendering displays throughout the store -- showing digitally manipulated pictures of shoppers wearing various clothes that could be bought on the spot.

Some light digital retouching would make shoppers' on-screen personas look a little perkier and fitter than in real life. Meanwhile an artificial-intelligence engagement bot would shower these shoppers with upbeat comments from digital "friends" that didn't really exist. The net effect would be a cascade of pressure to buy, buy, buy.

"I want to patent that idea," Whiting declared. An audience member shot back: "And the EULA (end-user licensing agreement) for attending this session probably gave you all the rights to our ideas. It's a shame we didn't read it before we agreed to come."